I found myself picking up a copy of Out of My Life and Thought by Albert Schweitzer and reading quickly through it. Schweitzer was in the kind of dilemma which attacks many people. After you've accumulated knowledge, cultivated whatever civilized sensibility exists, what decision do you make in relation to these privileges? Especially if thinking and sensibility makes you go beyond what is apparent and flourishing around you? And most especially if your religious feelings run fairly deep and has absorbed the enlarging vision of the religious founder? You can go into Politics, Business, Church, Education, Art, Medicine, Entertainment. Each presents opportunities and enormous drawbacks. I can't think of too many individuals who have thrown themselves into these pursuits and have come out unscathed.

The overwhelming pressure is to do something in the normal sense. Everything is planned around it. Everything encompasses it. Many people make it their full-time career that this be so. There's always the primitive fear of insanity to keep the miscreant in tow. And yet, history, recent an otherwise, is replete with the evidence that the shadow needs its fair share of humiliation.

I believe Schweitzer would say that the individual person must be driven by something larger than himself, his own desires or the desires of the society. As things become more complex, these desires are absorbed into the form of organization; everything more or less grinds to a common level that is very demoralizing, especially when you are younger and concerned that your hard won sensibility is useless.

Schweitzer makes great sense when he alluldes to this thought: That the only real action is renunciation and suffering. Everything else is a herky jerky reaction of the fantasies of mind. That is one of the keys, the decision of whether one actually renounces and suffers or simply admires and learns from these things.

These crux moments are met from time to time. And the decisions must be made with the clearest mind.

My feelings on religion are fairly ambiguous. I believe and yet smell a rat every time I pass a church or preacher. But I think it is very dangerous to transfer all of that dissatisfaction to the political realm. And one has to admit those thoughts that have been imposed by your own naivete.

I can't get thrilled or inspired by religious fundamentalism or the political extremism that comes out of the repression of religious instinct. I think they are both degrading elements that always lead to disaster. I can understand the sincerity which provokes the extremes- the "prime insight" but that sincerity and "prime insight" always comes freighted with disastrous junk, with neurotic, even psychotic symptoms, which is for the eternally sick soul that Christ was attempting to redeem.

On the other hand there's something to be said about the fact that his is a "new time". The circumstances and events of modernity have destroyed all relation to the past and the world is re-creating itself anew. That may be a simple hyperbole but you have to be honest and courageous enough to see for yourself.

I'm certain many people are bothered by many things in this society. One of mine is this: It is slanted to the barbaric. The roving nomads of Attila and the Gobi Desert would be more comfortable in this society than a dozen civilized luminaries. Many have warned about the mass man and authority. I hope it hasn't taken root in this country. We like to believe the individaul is sancrosant and always becoming his or her best self. I'm suspicious of both right-wing populists and the intelligent liberals who kowtow to these kinds of things and who even encourage it from time to time.

There are surprises along the way of course, so it's not all encompassing horror. You can turn everything off and leave the camps. But politics, something that is supposed to captivate me, panders to the mass man and surrenders to him and her more often than not. The conservatives pander to a false image of themselves and of history. The radicals on either wing react to these dominant attitudes. What is a guy to do?

No, it is hard to have a real interest in the apparent society. The political society and the mass entertainment society at any rate, which do make up a chunk of the society. I have more interest in the political society as an obligation for being a free, liberal democratic citizen. The mass entertainment society is one of the most facetious creations in human history and deserves to die a quick, painless death.

The social crowds become easier to handle as you grow and develop. The more confident you are the easier it is to appreciate variety. The stupidities of the society are a very unfortunate thing. And always, on the other side of the society, is that magic word mentioned by Schweitzer, "Renunication."

1984

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